


A Place With No Religion

by AliceTabitha



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: BoO Spoilers, Brief mentions of other characters - Freeform, Dark Percy, F/M, Nightmares, Panic Attacks, Percy blames himself for everything, Post-Tartarus (Percy Jackson), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, but realistic with how I think it would have gone, hints at depression, if it wasn't a kids' book, percy and annabeth need a hug, quite depressing really, sort of, survivor's guilt, you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2017-01-17
Packaged: 2018-09-18 05:42:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9370679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AliceTabitha/pseuds/AliceTabitha
Summary: Percy was falling. A never ending, insides ripping kind of falling - and he knew where he was going to land.Percy relives Tartarus with every breath, every dark and broken night. His memories chase him, and the guilt feels like it will swallow him even deeper than the muskeg. He and Annabeth must try and cope together and learn to overcome their nightmares, but for now all Percy can do is keep breathing.





	

**Author's Note:**

> My very first contribution to the Percy Jackson franchise, very kindly and expertly beta'd by the amazing Simran, who you should definitely go and check out at http://kazbrekkkerz.tumblr.com/
> 
> Title stolen from Regina Spektor's Man of a Thousand Faces.
> 
> I feel like this is a more realistic, though depressing, version of what life would have been like for Percy and Annabeth after Tartarus. I don't think everything would have been able to go back to normal - they had literally gone to hell - so I hope to have written a coherent portrayal of the consequences of the fall.
> 
> Enjoy :D

Percy was falling. A never ending, insides ripping kind of falling - and he knew where he was going to land. The knowledge of his destination made it all so much worse. At least the first time, he hadn't really grasped what would be waiting for him once he arrived there, but now his brain was racing with all of the horrors he knew he could expect, the ones that he had seen and he knew would be waiting for him yet still could produce no solutions on how to avoid them.

He reached out around him frantically, desperate for something, anything, to tether him to reality - or at least get a hold on the reality he was currently in. The first time he had clung to Annabeth, he knew she should be there somewhere, and yet he continued to fall alone, continued to feel nothing but intense isolation and blood-freezing fear.

Suddenly, he wasn't falling anymore. No, instead he was burning all over. Skin blistering and boiling as he drowned in the flames of what the rational part of his mind knew to be the Phlegethon, but the loudest, most coherent part insisted to be his ruin.

The burning stopped.

Annabeth was there now, wandering alone in the dark expanse of Tartarus, calling out to him, her voice filled with so much terror it shattered his icy heart into sharp, painful fragments.

"Why did you leave me all over again?" she cried, so fractured and weak, not anything like he knew her to be. "Percy, where are you?"

He tried to call out to her, reassure her he was there, but his throat closed up and he could make no sound. His body began to decay in front of him, turning to mist and bone. He fought his way over to her, but every time he drew near, she would vanish and reappear fifty feet ahead of him. Still, he tried, watching as his arms became skeletal, his voice still refusing to produce sound, his body still defiant in its movements.

"That's it, Percy," a different voice whispered. "Embrace the misery. Nobody is here to save you this time." And Percy was drowning for real now, trapped in the well where he, Piper and Jason had all worked to free the naiads. The water turned murky, getting thicker and dirtier, and Percy was no longer in the well, but the muskeg, the mud getting up his nose, in his ears, clogging his throat. The son of Poseidon being slowly lulled to death by the rocking of the water.

"She's right, Percy," Annabeth was back, talking to him through the layers of dirt and silt in the water. Her face appeared as Gaia's had in the ground on so many occasions. "No-one is going to help you out of this. Why should they? Do you really think you deserve to be saved?"

Another face replaced hers, Leo laughing at him as he suffocated, mocking the son of Poseidon, failing in his element. "That's it, Percy. You go drown yourself. It's hilarious really - we both faced our own strengths and had them turn on us." He absent mindedly began tinkering with something, morphing copper and screws into a replica of the minotaur horn that still hung above his bed. "You know, you could have done something for me. I could do something for you now, but why should I? You let me die. I think I'll return the favour."

The scene changed abruptly, and Percy coughed and heaved the water out of his lungs against a river bank, disoriented and broken. He watched in horror as shapes formed around him, showing him Luke dying on the ground, his fault. Bianca vanishing into the death trap of an automaton, his fault. Beckendorf detonating the bomb, his fault.

Bob.

Damasen.

Silena Beauregard.

Ethan Nakamura.

The faces of the dead just kept coming.

So many lives lost, and Percy knew it was because of him. Because he didn't try hard enough, or because he didn't look for another option, always too hasty in his decisions. None of them should have died - it should have been him instead.

Then more images sparked into view, this time showing him the future, what will happen soon. And still, he knew it would continue to be his fault.

Annabeth held down, crying out and struggling as her skin was slowly peeled back by her own dagger. Piper going mad, staring into Katoptris unblinkingly, stuck forever in her looking glass. His mother ambushed in her own apartment, easily taken down by the same minotaur who first caused Percy's life to be turned upside down, torn up and precariously stitched back together.

Suddenly, he felt someone touching him. Something gentle in this unforgiving nightmare . That's the thing - he knew it was a nightmare, just a bad dream all in his head- demigod dreams should be something he was used to by now, but when he woke up all he could see was the dead. Annabeth's worried eyes turned black, bleeding.

He gasped, throwing himself away from her and out of the bed. He wasn't ready for this. He thought it would be over once the war ended - the second war he had had to fight, to be out on the front lines again, so close to the first.

He watched as Annabeth's lips moved, aware that she was talking to him. But he couldn't breathe. He couldn't see anything other than the bodies he had caused and the nightmare he had just lived through. His heart pounded heavily in his chest, almost breaking out of his ribcage. Every day was no longer a life-or-death situation, and so his nights decided to take over and offer him new dangers every time he closed his eyes, making him relive his old battles but so much worse. He felt like he was going to die.

He kept seeing them, kept feeling his past wounds, and kept suffocating. He was under the earth again, and he couldn't get any air into his body. Distantly, he felt hands on his face, stroking under his eyes, around his mouth. He could hear the echoes of a voice - a familiar, gentle, loving voice.

"It's okay, Percy, just squeeze my hands," Annabeth soothed as she took his shaking hands, and it was such a stark contrast to everything he had seen and felt and heard in his dreams, he could barely allow himself to believe it. "Just breathe, okay? That's it, like that." Percy's breathing became gradually less erratic, but it wasn't enough. He could still feel the pressure of that muskeg over his mouth. He squeezed harder.

"Shh, come on Seaweed Brain. With me, Percy," Annabeth instructed, pressing her cool forehead against his. "That's it, time your breathing with mine."

Percy didn't know how long they stayed there like that in the corner of his room, just breathing. Eventually he managed to control his body enough to release the tension that had stayed with him from his dream, letting out a final rattling breath as he almost dropped to the ground in exhaustion. Annabeth moved closer to him and enveloped him in a hug, her small body encompassing his in a way that caused Percy to calm down considerably, leaving him with shaking fingers that he combed through her hair methodically, but at least he wasn't suffocating any more.

Still, neither of them talked except for the occasional Shh that came from Annabeth as she gently stroked up and down his back. Finally, she moved back enough to be able to look at him, but still she kept hold of his arms, never stopping the comforting patterns she traced on them with her steady fingers.

"Do you want to talk about it?" They had been doing this same routine since coming back from Tartarus and ending the war with the Giants. Some nights, it was as it was now, while others Annabeth was the one in the corner while Percy kept her warm and safe from her memories.

"Annabeth..." he whispered raspily as though he had spent the past hour screaming- and perhaps he had. He was scared, yes, but he was also mad. Mad at himself but also at the Titans and Giants, even the freaking Gods up on Olympus that shouldn't even exist anymore. The ones who made him angry with himself, while they should really get the blame.

"Fuck, Annabeth. We're just kids." He moved away from her, looking her in the eye. "I don't understand..."

She looked at him with his grief and anger reflected in her stormy gaze. Percy half expected lighting to flash across her face by how intense it was. "I don't think we ever will, Percy. We are kids.We're fucking seventeen. We've been through two separate wars we got dragged into when we were twelve. But Percy," she looked down and touched his necklace, lifting it up in between them. "We're still here. We're still collecting these godforsaken beads. And you know what? I bet there will be more wars, more stupid arguments between the gods that we have to pick a side in, have to fight in. But we will keep being here. Because that's what we do.

"I don't understand why, and neither does any demigod ever born, but for some reason, we will keep fighting out parents' battles because they're our battles too. So forget the gods for a minute, and the titans and the fucking giants and just be here. With me." She took a shaky breath and dropped the necklace back to Percy's chest.

He shifted slightly, resting his head on her shoulders and breathed her in. "I just wish I wasn’t so scared all the time."

They didn't say anything more after that. Neither did they go back to sleep. They simply sat there, in the corner, being with each other. Eventually, Percy hoped it would be okay, but for now, he knew he would have to suffer through more nightmares, whether they be his own or Annabeth's. They would simply just have deal with them together. And Percy accepted that. What more could he do?

After all, he never asked to be a half-blood.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Let's hope it gets better for our dear Percabeth soon. 
> 
> You can find me over at tumblr at http://alicetabitha.tumblr.com/ and my incredible beta/editor at http://kazbrekkkerz.tumblr.com/ (give her credit for the last line especially. She managed to work through my 2am ramblings to help produce what you have just read.)


End file.
